Reordering Nets for Low Power

May 10, 2009

As posts accumulate, you can see that low power design aspects is a big topic on this site. I try to bring more subtle design examples for lower power design that you can control and implement (i.e. in RTL and the micro architectural stage).

Identifying “glitchy” nets is not always easy. Some good candidates are wide parity or CRC calculations (deep and wide XOR trees), complicated arithmetic paths and basically most logic that originates in very wide buses and converges to a single output controlling a specific path (e.g. as a select pin of a MUX for a wide data path).

If you happen to identify a good candidate, it is advisable (when possible) that you feed the “glitchy” nets as late as possible in the calculation path. This way the total amount of toggling in the logic is reduced.

Sounds easy enough? Well the crux of the problem is identifying those opportunities – and it is far from easy. I hope this post at least makes you more aware of that possibility.

To sum up, here are two figures that illustrate the issue visually. The figure below depicts the situation before the transformation.. The nets which are highlighted represent high activity nets.

After the transformation – pushing the glitchy net calculation late in the path. The transformation is logically equivalent (otherwise there is no point…) and we see less high activity nets.

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3 comments

Hi,
i was going through this glitch article and was not able to find how the both logic in the fig are equivalent, i tried to compare them with Boolean truth table like, g=0;s=1. will not give the same o/p if they swapped,,,
can you help me in understanding